9 ms·

Why that Thunderbolt add-in card doesn't work properly in your unsupported PC

132 points by noexani 5y ago

Gualdrapo 5y ago
I wish that article was posted some months ago. I literally burned my eyes for a whole day trying to figure out why this Apple Thunderbolt Display refused to work with a HP 800 G4 SFF plus the Thunderbolt PCIe card and, when it finally showed some image, the brightness was at its maximum - after a while the thing was really hot. Until finally I noticed the 'security' thing and set it to none, and could set its brightness to a lower setting and my eyes said thank you.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I have almost the same setup (using an 800 G4 mini), and a thunderbolt display. This mostly works, but it's pretty terrible. If the display goes to sleep (say after a period of inactivity) it's impossible to wake up. Also, if I plug it in while the computer is running, the image won't come on. Do you have any of these issues, and if no, did you do anything specific to address them?
willcipriano 5y ago
Site is down for me: https://archive.is/ZmUWK https://archive.is/ZmUWK
jakemauer 5y ago
As someone who has wrestled with the Gigabyte Titan Ridge card on a hackintosh, including flashing different firmwares many times with a raspberry pi as an SPI tool, this article is so so interesting. So much of getting this stuff to work feels like random luck and incantation. I really appreciate the author’s research and effort in writing this up.
Namidairo 5y ago
While Thunderbolt on AMD systems isn't a widespread phenomenon, there are a couple current-gen motherboards with TB3 ports, and one with TB4. (They are however, somewhat pricey.) From what I can see, eGPU configurations are specifically called out as unsupported, and people trying have a few hurdles to jump as well.
Waterluvian 5y ago
I have plugged so many dongles and cables into my laptop to find the one combination that gives me two 4K monitors at 60hz. It was infuriating how many things plug in properly but don’t actually convey the capabilities I wanted. Even picking the wrong DisplayPort cable will limit it at 30hz. I understand there are explanations that are perfectly cromulent to engineers. But they aren’t any good to the other 99% of users.
- caslon 5y ago
  There are perfectly fine explanations to most people, actually, and anyone who disagrees greatly underestimates the ability of the common person to understand analogies. People in tech-focused communities tend to treat every common person like they're caricatures of the absentminded father or clueless wife in a 1980s cartoon. "See, it's like you made a pizza with cake flour. It won't taste good, it won't cook quite right, and you'll be disappointed even though it kind of works. There's nothing bad about cake flour, and it works really well for what it's intended for, but it can't be used for everything." "Imagine you were using bad steel when you were forging a blade. It'll crack, roll or worse, but it'll still look vaguely knife-like." "It's like you're wanting to play electric rock music but you're missing a few strings and you don't have a pickup so it's really pretty much just a weirdly-shaped banjo."
  - TillE 5y ago
    Those are some descriptions of things, but how do they work as analogies? They don't explain anything.
    - caslon 5y ago
      "Thing does not Fulfill Requirements so you don't get Desired Outcome." This is a pattern that literally every human understands in their own niche. "The Pizza was made with Cake Flour so it's Low-Quality." "The Blade was made with Low-Carbon Steel so it's Unsafe and Weak." "The Cable was made Without the Proper Materials so It's Subpar.
jeffbee 5y ago
I guess this happens because people want an AMD CPU and Thunderbolt? It seems like a hell of a lot of trouble to go through just to keep from having to buy a properly integrated machine like a NUC, pretty much every Intel laptop, or a Mac.
- jagger27 5y ago
  One you compile a monstrous C++ project with -j32 on a Ryzen 5950X you'll understand why people find it worth the trouble to stick with AMD for things like this.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    K but where does the thunderbolt enter the story? It’s not that useful.
    - Tsiklon 5y ago
      It’s not unreasonable for someone to have a one cable system these days with thunderbolt. Personally I have a 18 Intel core workstation with a single thunderbolt 3 cable running to a Caldigit TS3+ dock. During work hours I unplug the dock, and plug my work laptop into the dock instead, and make use of the same keyboard, mouse, monitors, microphone, DAC/AMP, network switch port. Minimal fuss and inconvenience switching between work and private life. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to desire the same results on an AMD solution.
brandonmenc 5y ago
Does Thunderbolt anything work properly? In the past few years I have used five brand new MacBooks (all different models and years, work and personal), four monitors, three Thunderbolt docks - everything new and name brand, including $80 name brand cables - and every single combination has crashed and/or required reboots daily, constant power cycling of monitors, etc etc. When it all works, it's awesome. But it's unbelievably flaky and annoying, and I can't understand why the bugs haven't been ironed out yet. However, even with a daily reboot it's still more convenient than plugging five cables into my laptop every time I want to dock it. Edit: I should note that Big Sur is very stable, requiring only weekly-ish reboots.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  There might be some implementation details, in particular for thunderbolt 3. Some 9 years ago, I worked at a place where we had macbooks and Apple Thunderbolt displays. I don't remember ever having issues. And I personally had two displays daisy-chained, with random USB and FireWire peripherals hanging off them. One of the screens or the computer itself developed a contact issue many years later, which of course isn't great, but the connection itself has always been rock-solid. I remember at one point, after the High Sierra upgrade I think, but I'm not 100% sure on the date, I had some issues with the same thunderbolt screen and the same MBP. But by that time, they had already changed the font rendering, so I didn't use that display as often. Also, the GPU drivers at the time were terribly broken and the MBP would lag like crazy when using it. A few upgrades later, it was solved. However, in PC land, I have an HP desktop with an HP thunderbolt / usb-c card, and it's hit-and-miss. My understanding is it has something to do with waking up the controller or something, but I've never managed to get it working 100% reliably. DisplayPort alternate mode is broken on Windows, too. I have a friend with a Dell XPS with integrated Thunderbolt, and he gets the exact same behaviour. At least his DP output works...
  - bitL 5y ago
    I only had issues with Apple and Thunderbolt, e.g. display resolution restricted to 1440p instead of 2160p when the same cable on a Windows NUC delivered 5k2k HDR10 resolution without any issues.
rsend1 5y ago
I added a Thunderbolt 3 port to a laptop with this method, this is a nice summary of things. I also needed to prod some registers to make the card visible, so I have a UEFI script that does this on boot. https://rsend.wordpress.com/x210-coreboot/adding-a-thunderbolt-3-port-to-an-x210-laptop/ https://rsend.wordpress.com/x210-coreboot/adding-a-thunderbo...
- wheybags 5y ago
  Wow, really nice job!
Teknoman117 5y ago
I actually got a GC-TITAN-RIDGE v2 card working in the way that was described in the stack overflow post that was linked. I'm really enjoying not having to reboot my PC every time I change the configuration on my PCIe enabled FPGA dev boards.
robotbikes 5y ago
Reminds me of how excited I was to get a USB Ethernet port for my Packard Bell 1st gen pentium 60mhz that was discounted because it had the floating point bug. But yeah it just didn't work due to failing drivers and that is when I realized that the future promised by these plug and play protocols was going to be fraught by the same hardware compatibility challenges that make building systems hard. I also have a motherboard currently where the usb-c port only works at USB 2.0 speeds in both Linux and Windows. I get the feeling that it is probably just broken for everyone who had this model and support didn't have much to say either. This stuff is hard and one can hope that it eventually gets figured out but I suspect not.
- toast0 5y ago
  What was a 60 mhz Pentium system doing with a USB port? It certainly didn't come with one, as by the time USB was released in mid 1996 the FDIV pentiums had been recalled for a year and a half (December 1994). USB support on Windows didn't really get acceptable until windows 98 and even then it wasn't good, so I'm not surprised the USB Ethernet device didn't work out.
  - simtel20 5y ago
    It sounds like a card was purchased and installed in the PC.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      Yeah, USB + Ethernet [+ Firewire] all-in-one cards used to be reasonably common, because many motherboards in the PII-PIII time didn't have USB or only had two USB ports, and a lot also did not have an on-board Ethernet port.
    - robotbikes 5y ago
      I could be wrong considering it was over 2 decades ago and I never verified the floating point bug. There were no expansion ports on the computer and so I was using one of the built-in USB ports as that was the only expansion possible. This seems like the motherboard it would have used https://pb.retropc.se/770.html https://pb.retropc.se/770.html But yeah windows 95 did have very limited USB support based upon the 2nd service pack if I remember correctly but it did not really work very well.
1970-01-01 5y ago
Thunderbolt is what plug and play was in '95. It just works (except it mostly doesn't) on PCs.

132 points by noexani 5y ago

I wish that article was posted some months ago. I literally burned my eyes for a whole day trying to figure out why this Apple Thunderbolt Display refused to work with a HP 800 G4 SFF plus the Thunderbolt PCIe card and, when it finally showed some image, the brightness was at its maximum - after a while the thing was really hot. Until finally I noticed the 'security' thing and set it to none, and could set its brightness to a lower setting and my eyes said thank you.

vladvasiliu 5y ago
I have almost the same setup (using an 800 G4 mini), and a thunderbolt display. This mostly works, but it's pretty terrible. If the display goes to sleep (say after a period of inactivity) it's impossible to wake up. Also, if I plug it in while the computer is running, the image won't come on. Do you have any of these issues, and if no, did you do anything specific to address them?

willcipriano 5y ago

Site is down for me: https://archive.is/ZmUWK https://archive.is/ZmUWK

jakemauer 5y ago

As someone who has wrestled with the Gigabyte Titan Ridge card on a hackintosh, including flashing different firmwares many times with a raspberry pi as an SPI tool, this article is so so interesting. So much of getting this stuff to work feels like random luck and incantation. I really appreciate the author’s research and effort in writing this up.

Namidairo 5y ago

While Thunderbolt on AMD systems isn't a widespread phenomenon, there are a couple current-gen motherboards with TB3 ports, and one with TB4. (They are however, somewhat pricey.) From what I can see, eGPU configurations are specifically called out as unsupported, and people trying have a few hurdles to jump as well.

Waterluvian 5y ago

I have plugged so many dongles and cables into my laptop to find the one combination that gives me two 4K monitors at 60hz. It was infuriating how many things plug in properly but don’t actually convey the capabilities I wanted. Even picking the wrong DisplayPort cable will limit it at 30hz. I understand there are explanations that are perfectly cromulent to engineers. But they aren’t any good to the other 99% of users.

caslon 5y ago
There are perfectly fine explanations to most people, actually, and anyone who disagrees greatly underestimates the ability of the common person to understand analogies. People in tech-focused communities tend to treat every common person like they're caricatures of the absentminded father or clueless wife in a 1980s cartoon. "See, it's like you made a pizza with cake flour. It won't taste good, it won't cook quite right, and you'll be disappointed even though it kind of works. There's nothing bad about cake flour, and it works really well for what it's intended for, but it can't be used for everything." "Imagine you were using bad steel when you were forging a blade. It'll crack, roll or worse, but it'll still look vaguely knife-like." "It's like you're wanting to play electric rock music but you're missing a few strings and you don't have a pickup so it's really pretty much just a weirdly-shaped banjo."
- TillE 5y ago
  Those are some descriptions of things, but how do they work as analogies? They don't explain anything.
  - caslon 5y ago
    "Thing does not Fulfill Requirements so you don't get Desired Outcome." This is a pattern that literally every human understands in their own niche. "The Pizza was made with Cake Flour so it's Low-Quality." "The Blade was made with Low-Carbon Steel so it's Unsafe and Weak." "The Cable was made Without the Proper Materials so It's Subpar.

jeffbee 5y ago

I guess this happens because people want an AMD CPU and Thunderbolt? It seems like a hell of a lot of trouble to go through just to keep from having to buy a properly integrated machine like a NUC, pretty much every Intel laptop, or a Mac.

jagger27 5y ago
One you compile a monstrous C++ project with -j32 on a Ryzen 5950X you'll understand why people find it worth the trouble to stick with AMD for things like this.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  K but where does the thunderbolt enter the story? It’s not that useful.
  - Tsiklon 5y ago
    It’s not unreasonable for someone to have a one cable system these days with thunderbolt. Personally I have a 18 Intel core workstation with a single thunderbolt 3 cable running to a Caldigit TS3+ dock. During work hours I unplug the dock, and plug my work laptop into the dock instead, and make use of the same keyboard, mouse, monitors, microphone, DAC/AMP, network switch port. Minimal fuss and inconvenience switching between work and private life. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to desire the same results on an AMD solution.

brandonmenc 5y ago

Does Thunderbolt anything work properly? In the past few years I have used five brand new MacBooks (all different models and years, work and personal), four monitors, three Thunderbolt docks - everything new and name brand, including $80 name brand cables - and every single combination has crashed and/or required reboots daily, constant power cycling of monitors, etc etc. When it all works, it's awesome. But it's unbelievably flaky and annoying, and I can't understand why the bugs haven't been ironed out yet. However, even with a daily reboot it's still more convenient than plugging five cables into my laptop every time I want to dock it. Edit: I should note that Big Sur is very stable, requiring only weekly-ish reboots.

vladvasiliu 5y ago
There might be some implementation details, in particular for thunderbolt 3. Some 9 years ago, I worked at a place where we had macbooks and Apple Thunderbolt displays. I don't remember ever having issues. And I personally had two displays daisy-chained, with random USB and FireWire peripherals hanging off them. One of the screens or the computer itself developed a contact issue many years later, which of course isn't great, but the connection itself has always been rock-solid. I remember at one point, after the High Sierra upgrade I think, but I'm not 100% sure on the date, I had some issues with the same thunderbolt screen and the same MBP. But by that time, they had already changed the font rendering, so I didn't use that display as often. Also, the GPU drivers at the time were terribly broken and the MBP would lag like crazy when using it. A few upgrades later, it was solved. However, in PC land, I have an HP desktop with an HP thunderbolt / usb-c card, and it's hit-and-miss. My understanding is it has something to do with waking up the controller or something, but I've never managed to get it working 100% reliably. DisplayPort alternate mode is broken on Windows, too. I have a friend with a Dell XPS with integrated Thunderbolt, and he gets the exact same behaviour. At least his DP output works...
- bitL 5y ago
  I only had issues with Apple and Thunderbolt, e.g. display resolution restricted to 1440p instead of 2160p when the same cable on a Windows NUC delivered 5k2k HDR10 resolution without any issues.

rsend1 5y ago

I added a Thunderbolt 3 port to a laptop with this method, this is a nice summary of things. I also needed to prod some registers to make the card visible, so I have a UEFI script that does this on boot. https://rsend.wordpress.com/x210-coreboot/adding-a-thunderbolt-3-port-to-an-x210-laptop/ https://rsend.wordpress.com/x210-coreboot/adding-a-thunderbo...

wheybags 5y ago
Wow, really nice job!

Teknoman117 5y ago

I actually got a GC-TITAN-RIDGE v2 card working in the way that was described in the stack overflow post that was linked. I'm really enjoying not having to reboot my PC every time I change the configuration on my PCIe enabled FPGA dev boards.

robotbikes 5y ago

Reminds me of how excited I was to get a USB Ethernet port for my Packard Bell 1st gen pentium 60mhz that was discounted because it had the floating point bug. But yeah it just didn't work due to failing drivers and that is when I realized that the future promised by these plug and play protocols was going to be fraught by the same hardware compatibility challenges that make building systems hard. I also have a motherboard currently where the usb-c port only works at USB 2.0 speeds in both Linux and Windows. I get the feeling that it is probably just broken for everyone who had this model and support didn't have much to say either. This stuff is hard and one can hope that it eventually gets figured out but I suspect not.

toast0 5y ago
What was a 60 mhz Pentium system doing with a USB port? It certainly didn't come with one, as by the time USB was released in mid 1996 the FDIV pentiums had been recalled for a year and a half (December 1994). USB support on Windows didn't really get acceptable until windows 98 and even then it wasn't good, so I'm not surprised the USB Ethernet device didn't work out.
- simtel20 5y ago
  It sounds like a card was purchased and installed in the PC.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Yeah, USB + Ethernet [+ Firewire] all-in-one cards used to be reasonably common, because many motherboards in the PII-PIII time didn't have USB or only had two USB ports, and a lot also did not have an on-board Ethernet port.
  - robotbikes 5y ago
    I could be wrong considering it was over 2 decades ago and I never verified the floating point bug. There were no expansion ports on the computer and so I was using one of the built-in USB ports as that was the only expansion possible. This seems like the motherboard it would have used https://pb.retropc.se/770.html https://pb.retropc.se/770.html But yeah windows 95 did have very limited USB support based upon the 2nd service pack if I remember correctly but it did not really work very well.

1970-01-01 5y ago

Thunderbolt is what plug and play was in '95. It just works (except it mostly doesn't) on PCs.